"a great number of factors can render a species undomesticable. Therefore, all successfully domesticated species are not so because of a particular positive trait, but because of a lack of any number of possible negative traits. In chapter 9, six groups of reasons for failed domestication of animals are defined: Moore describes applications of the ""Anna Karenina principle"" in ecology: Successful ecological risk assessments are all alike; every unsuccessful ecological risk assessment fails in its own way. Tolstoy posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina : ""Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its"
"prayed every day in the Moran household, and the event is a repeating motif throughout the novel. The novel opens with an elderly, weak, and depressed Michael Moran being taken care of by his daughters. Although they have busy lives and families of their own in Dublin and London, they have never really left the family home because they feel more important there. They have decided to recreate ""Monaghan Day,"" an event Moran always seemed to enjoy, hoping that this will somehow reverse his failing health. Monaghan Day was a market day, when Moran's friend McQuaid used to visit and"
"of the greatest openings of any book. ""Berg"" is set in the English seaside town of Brighton, which was also where Quin grew up, and her home for most of her life, until her death by suicide in 1973; the action takes place in winter when the resort was empty and desolately atmospheric. The plot has echoes of Oedipus and Freudian theory, involving a romantic triangle between a man, his father, and the father's mistress Judith. The son attempts to murder the father, but ends up mutilating a ventriloquist's dummy and dragging it around town convinced it is his father's"
"the girls marry well in order to support the others upon his death. Jane Austen's opening line, ""It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"", is a sentence filled with irony and playfulness. The novel revolves around the importance of marrying for love, not simply for money, despite the social pressures to make a good (i.e., wealthy) match. ""Pride and Prejudice"" has long fascinated readers, consistently appearing near the top of lists of ""most-loved books"" among both literary scholars and the general public. It has"
"three women from an unhappy family beset by the corrosive anger passed on from one generation to the next. The novel is divided into three sections named after the unlucky Opal, her emotionally cold daughter Pearl and her troubled granddaughter Vivien. It opens in 1915 with Opal's marriage to a misogynistic lawyer whose coldness and cruelty toward his wife and daughters reverberates through succeeding generations in loveless marriages and broken relationships. The novel ends as Vivien struggles to break free from her family's legacy of anger so that her own daughter can escape its destructive cycle. The idea for the"
"of ""The Daily Telegraph"" wrote that the story starts off with a familiar premise but ends ""with some far more troubling and resonant points about justice and forgiveness"". Doug Johnstone of ""The Independent"" called the story ""King at his absolute best"". Carol Memmott of ""USA Today"" called it the best story of the collection and wrote, ""It's a grim reminder that you can never really know the people you love, and it's a warning about how the little things in life can be the tipping point toward a living nightmare."" A Good Marriage A Good Marriage is a novella by"
"line to the works of Charles Dickens in England, particularly his 1838 work ""Nicholas Nickleby"" (which featured a similar storyline), and the 1844 novel ""Martin Chuzzlewit"", which also featured criticisms of class society in the United States. The story centres on the wealthy and prosperous Harley family, consisting of: Frank (the father), Gazella (the mother), and their nine children. After a series of bad investments results in bankruptcy, the Harleys are forced into destitution, which in turn leads to Frank's untimely death from excessive drinking. Gazella continues life as a seamstress in order to provide for her children, two of"
"however, and each can be read as an independent story. There are similarities and differences in the experiences of the Whiteoak family and that of de la Roche. While the lives and successes of the Whiteoaks rise and fall, there remained for them the steadiness of the family manor, known as Jalna. De la Roche's family endured the illness of her mother, the perpetual job searches of her father, and the adoption of her orphaned cousin while being moved 17 times. Several critics believe that Finch Whiteoak who majors in ""Finch's Fortune"" (1932) is a reflection of de la Roche"
"book, it occurs in the household of Patrick Henry. Throughout the novel, there are many conflicts. In the beginning of the novel, the main conflict is the fact that their mother goes crazy and becomes unable to care for the family. This leaves a gap in the family, especially with their father gone the majority of the time. Patsy and her siblings are forced to cope with life without their mother, many at a very young age. This conflict starts out the whole novel. The other conflicts that follow include Patsy's harsh reign and how their siblings have to live"
"book was published, Elizabeth Jordan exclaimed in her autobiography: """"The Whole Family"" was a mess!"" Critic Alfred Bendixen sympathized when he wrote: ""As ""The Whole Family"" developed, the plot increasingly focused on family misunderstandings and family rivalries, which were mirrored by the artistic rivalries of the authors. The writing of the novel became a contest as much as it was a collaboration, with each author trying hard to impose his vision on the entire work."" In his long, dense but insightful chapter, and with charged rhetoric reminiscent of his late novels, Henry James has the aesthetic son Charles Talbert rail"
"the comfortable economy of their household, while the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet serves to illustrate bad marriages based on an initial attraction and surface over substance (economic and psychological). The Bennets' marriage is one such example that the youngest Bennet, Lydia, will come to re-enact with Wickham, and the results are far from felicitous. Though the central characters, Elizabeth and Darcy, begin the novel as hostile acquaintances and unlikely friends, they eventually work to understand each other and themselves so that they can marry each other on compatible terms personally, even if their ""equal"" social status remains fraught."
"Orwell's Animal Farm by saying to her daughter, ""All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others."" The producers of the novela clearly come down on the progressive side of the class debate: with the exception of Daniel, every upper-class character is stereotyped as snobbish, greedy, insane, or all three. One of the Novela's primary villains, Veronica, continually evokes her membership in the upper-class as justification for her unsavory and occasionally violent actions. In contrast, the Fabiana's working-class family and neighbors are consistently portrayed sympathetically as hard-working people who want nothing more than happiness for everyone, regardless"
"twentieth century up until the early years of the Obama administration. The novel ""chronicles the struggling marriage of Walter and Patty, a Mid-Western, middle-class couple, interlaced with painfully accurate observations on the travails of family life – incompatible siblings, unruly offspring, inadequate parents and, in its bleakest moments, the slow collective march towards death."" ""Freedom"" opens with a short history of the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal liberal and middle-class family, and they are among the first families to move into"
"be possessed of"", and ""Certainly, Love and Affection for each other make the Happiest of all Societies."" The opening of the novel illustrates how Mrs Teachum's school came into being. She was married to a man that enjoyed 'improving' his wife by educating her, and Mrs Teachum had a disposition towards pleasing her husband, and received his instructions with enthusiasm. When her husband died, he was happy to leave his children in the care of his well educated wife. It was not to be. Within 12 months of the loss of her husband, Mrs Teachum would also suffer the loss"
"""We also feel that Hudson wants to tell us in this story that, long before this present meat-eating and destructive race took over all the world, there was a race of beings on the earth – beautiful, innocent, and bird-like, who lived in peace with nature and themselves, and of whom Rima and her mother were the last"". The title may spring from the Bible quote ""In my Father's house are many mansions"" (John 14:2), implying the pristine forest is a natural and sacred cathedral. The plot of the book resembles that in Hudson's earlier novel ""A Crystal Age"". The"
"at the end."""" Comic books, science-fiction, and fantasy literature all play an important role in Oscar's upbringing and identity, and each is incorporated into the novel to reflect the world he lives in. Díaz has said that to dismiss the novel's reflexivity with fiction and fantasy is to do to the novel ""exactly what Oscar suffered from, which is that...Oscar's interests, his views of the world, were dismissed as illegitimate, as unimportant, as make-believe"", and that the novel asks the reader ""to take not only Oscar seriously but his interests seriously."" The novel opens with the epigraph: ""Of what import"
"must deal with “Ms. Tyler's oddball families, which any self-respecting therapist would call ‘dysfunctional’... An inexplicable centripetal force hurls these relatives upon one another, catches them in a dizzying inward spiral of obligation, affection and old-fashioned guilt—as well as an inexpressible longing for some perfect or ""normal"" family in a distant past that never really was. Almost every novel by Anne Tyler begins with a loss or absence that reactivates in the family some primordial sense of itself.” Larry McMurtry wrote, ""...in book after book, siblings are drawn inexorably back home, as if their parents or (more often) grandparents had"
"at the level of the individual characters and families, religion, morality, gender and social class. The novel is divided into eight parts. Its epigraph is ""Vengeance is mine; I will repay"", from , which in turn quotes from . The novel begins with one of its most often-quoted lines: The novel opens with a scene that introduces Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky (""Stiva""), a Moscow aristocrat and civil servant who has been unfaithful to his wife, Princess Darya Alexandrovna (""Dolly""). Dolly has discovered his affair with the family's governess, and the household and family are in turmoil. Stiva informs the household"
"cribbage and preparing for bed; the second opens on the household bustling with activity as daybreak prompts bells ringing, arguments over receipts, collection of the chamber pots, calls for carriages, and greetings to new guests; the third closes with a ship's crew and passengers tossed about by a storm with strong winds. The answer—nightingale—is then (somewhat mistakenly) acted out by Becky in the role of a singing French marquise, recalling both Lacoste's 1705 tragic opera ""Philomèle"" and an ""arriviste"" lover and wife of Louis XIV. Apart from its importance in the book, the scenes were subsequently considered models of the"
"comparison. There is an apparent parallel between Grimm’s ""The Juniper Tree"" and his previous works, familial drama. Critic Walter Scherf in a study of the introductions of children’s literature, noted that out of 176 texts, 169 of them started with a basic family conflict. Similar to the plot in Juniper Tree, in Grimm’s ""Hansel and Gretel"", the children live with their stepmother who does not like them, and makes a plan to get rid of them. She states that in the morning she and her husband will take the children into the thickest part of the forest and leave them"
"complains before her mother Antu, but is mildly rebuked by her father Anu, is directly paralleled in Book V of the ""Iliad"". In this scene, Aphrodite, the later Greek adaptation of Ishtar, is wounded by the hero Diomedes and flees to Mount Olympus, where she cries to her mother Dione and is mildly rebuked by her father Zeus. Powell observes that the opening lines of the ""Odyssey"" seem to echo the opening lines of the ""Epic of Gilgamesh"". The storyline of the ""Odyssey"" likewise bears numerous similarities to that of the ""Epic of Gilgamesh"". Both Gilgamesh and Odysseus encounter a"
"In a review of the early novels in the sequence, Arthur Mizener wrote: ""Powell makes his great egoists, for all their absurdity, something not essentially different from all the rest of us; even Widmerpool, the most extravagant of the lot, is not. However sublimely ridiculous he becomes, he continues to remind us, not so much, perhaps, of what we have done, as what we have, in our time, known we might do"". At school (not identified but generally recognised as Eton) (description of wartime bomb damage tallies), Widmerpool is undistinguished academically and athletically, a ""gauche striver"" in the words of"
"miscommunication and mayhem in a family like no other."" ""Hello from the Gillespies"" was included on Oprah Winfrey's ""Three Books to Take on a Flight"" list, as well as Booktopia's 2014 Books of the Year and Australia's Favourite Author polls, and the Huffington Post's 2015 Top 10 Novels to Read this Winter list. In her 2017 novel, ""The Trip of a Lifetime"", McInerney reacquaints readers with the Quinlan family, previously featured in ""The Alphabet Sisters"" and ""Lola's Secret"". This time, the family's wilful and eccentric matriarch, Lola, takes her granddaughter and great-granddaughter to visit her Irish homeland. But as the"
"after the ""maiden"" in the poem ""Annabel Lee"" by Poe; this poem is alluded to many times in the novel, and its lines are borrowed to describe Humbert's love. A passage in chapter 11 reuses Poe's phrase ""...by the side of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride"". In the opening of the novel, the phrase ""Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied,"" is a pastiche of two passages of the poem, the ""winged seraphs of heaven"" (line 11), and ""The angels, not half so happy in heaven,"
"All Families Are Psychotic All Families Are Psychotic is the seventh novel by Douglas Coupland, published in 2001. The novel is the fictional story of the dysfunctional Drummond family and their adventures on a trip to see their daughter's space shuttle launch. The novel is the tale of the Drummond family from Vancouver gathering together to watch Sarah Drummond's space shuttle blast off at the Kennedy Space Center. The Drummonds are a group of misfits with a wide array of personal foibles and intricacies. The novel's plot is the tale of events that reunite the Drummond family after many years"
"the main series. All four novels were collected into one volume ""Happily Ever After"", including bonus content and epilogues. Cass stated that she began writing ""The Selection"" after thinking about the differences between Esther and Cinderella, wondering if either of them were happy with how they ended up. She also commented that she had written the book ""from start to finish"", while her writing process for the other books differed. In a dystopian fairy-tale world where society is divided into castes, with Ones as the most prosperous, consisting of royals and elites, and Eights who are mostly orphans, drug users,"
"are neither ""wholly good nor wholly bad"", but who seem to inhabit part of the real world. The names of the maids and bondservants are given in pinyin transcription and in David Hawkes' translation. In the opening chapter of the novel, a couplet is introduced: As one critic points out, the couplet signifies ""not a hard and fast division between truth and falsity, reality and illusion, but the impossibility of making such distinctions in any world, fictional or 'actual.'"" The name of the main family, Jia (賈, pronounced jiǎ), is a homophone with the character jiǎ 假, meaning false or"
"happiness in the novel, as the elite main characters seem trapped in a web of corruption, power and money from which they both stem. However, the plight of the handless beggar that hangs around Rose’s home certainly does not glamorize the lives of the Indian poor. ""Rich Like Us"" is a phrase introduced as a question, and continuing as such throughout the novel. This historical fiction entwines the fate of two upper-class females, Rose, a British immigrant and wife to powerful native business man Ram with Sonali, a highly educated young civil servant. The former struggles to find a sense"
"end with a nod to divine providence. ""Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John"" picks up the continuing story of the three cousins Patsy Doyle, Beth De Graf, and Louise Merrick, and their family; the plot of the book begins three days after the wedding of Louise and her fiancé Arthur Weldon, the event that concluded the fifth book in the series, ""Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society"". The sixth novel begins, as per pattern, with the cousins' Uncle John getting an inspiration for a new adventure: in this case, the family will escape a cold New York City winter by taking"
"family life in changing times. Her no-muss, no-fuss storytelling, if unsurprising, is also frequently subtle, wry and moving."" The New York Times review included 'Some Luck' was ""...very skillfully conceived, an elegant solution to the historical novelist’s problem of how to raise the big barn that is the past without relying too much on power tools or hired help."" Some Luck Some Luck is a 2014 novel by Jane Smiley. It is the first in a trilogy of novels about an Iowa family over the course of generations. It was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award. Beginning in 1920"
"name the family ""Robinson"", it is not a Swiss name. The German title translates as ""The Swiss Robinson"" which identifies the novel as part of the Robinsonade genre, rather than a story about a family named Robinson. The novel opens with the family in the hold of a sailing ship, weathering a great storm. The ship's passengers evacuate without them, and William and Elizabeth and their four children (Fritz, Ernest, Jack and Francis) are left to survive alone. As the ship tosses about, the father – William – prays that God will spare them. The ship survives the night and"
"ineffectual parents. In ""Pride and Prejudice"", the failure of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet as parents is blamed for Lydia's lack of moral judgment; Darcy, on the other hand, has been taught to be principled and scrupulously honourable, but he is also proud and overbearing. Kitty, rescued from Lydia's bad influence and spending more time with her older sisters after they marry, is said to improve greatly in their superior society. American novelist Anna Quindlen observed, in an introduction to an edition of Austen's novel in 1995: The opening line of the novel famously announces: ""It is a truth universally acknowledged,"
"events. The opening scene of the novel closely imitates Jane Austen's ""Pride and Prejudice"", as Lord Dibbleshire proposes to Lady India using speech very similar to the proposal that Darcy gives Elizabeth; James intends this as foreshadowing that India has much in common with Elizabeth, and Dibbleshire is just as arrogant as Darcy. Later in the novel, James writes a small speech for the Duke of Villiers that is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot. In many ways, the book is fairly typical for a Regency romance, in that it focuses heavily on manners and societal expectations. To keep her career, India"